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- 6320
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- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.921Z
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- text
- to be their grandsons? And why did all-seducing Ninon unintendingly
break scores of hearts at seventy? It is because of the perennialness of
womanly sweetness.
Out from the infantile, yet eternal mournfulness of the face of Isabel,
there looked on Pierre that angelic childlikeness, which our Savior
hints is the one only investiture of translated souls; for of such--even
of little children--is the other world.
Now, unending as the wonderful rivers, which once bathed the feet of the
primeval generations, and still remain to flow fast by the graves of all
succeeding men, and by the beds of all now living; unending,
ever-flowing, ran through the soul of Pierre, fresh and fresher, further
and still further, thoughts of Isabel. But the more his thoughtful river
ran, the more mysteriousness it floated to him; and yet the more
certainty that the mysteriousness was unchangeable. In her life there
was an unraveled plot; and he felt that unraveled it would eternally
remain to him. No slightest hope or dream had he, that what was dark and
mournful in her would ever be cleared up into some coming atmosphere of
light and mirth. Like all youths, Pierre had conned his novel-lessons;
had read more novels than most persons of his years; but their false,
inverted attempts at systematizing eternally unsystemizable elements;
their audacious, intermeddling impotency, in trying to unravel, and
spread out, and classify, the more thin than gossamer threads which make
up the complex web of life; these things over Pierre had no power now.
Straight through their helpless miserableness he pierced; the one
sensational truth in him transfixed like beetles all the speculative
lies in them. He saw that human life doth truly come from that, which
all men are agreed to call by the name of _God_; and that it partakes of
the unravelable inscrutableness of God. By infallible presentiment he
saw, that not always doth life's beginning gloom conclude in gladness;
that wedding-bells peal not ever in the last scene of life's fifth act;
that while the countless tribes of common novels laboriously spin veils
of mystery, only to complacently clear them up at last; and while the
countless tribe of common dramas do but repeat the same; yet the
profounder emanations of the human mind, intended to illustrate all that
can be humanly known of human life; these never unravel their own
intricacies, and have no proper endings; but in imperfect,
unanticipated, and disappointing sequels (as mutilated stumps), hurry to
abrupt intermergings with the eternal tides of time and fate.
So Pierre renounced all thought of ever having Isabel's dark lantern
illuminated to him. Her light was lidded, and the lid was locked. Nor
did he feel a pang at this. By posting hither and thither among the
reminiscences of his family, and craftily interrogating his remaining
relatives on his father's side, he might possibly rake forth some few
small grains of dubious and most unsatisfying things, which, were he
that way strongly bent, would only serve the more hopelessly to cripple
him in his practical resolves. He determined to pry not at all into this
sacred problem. For him now the mystery of Isabel possessed all the
bewitchingness of the mysterious vault of night, whose very darkness
evokes the witchery.
The thoughtful river still ran on in him, and now it floated still
another thing to him.
- title
- Chunk 3